[ Une première
journée de métaethique s'est tenue à Gordes (Vaucluse) le samedi 5 novembre 2016, autour de John SKORUPSKI et de son grand ouvrage The Domain of Reasons
(Oxford University Press). Sont également intervenus
lors de cette journée : Davide Fassio, Pascal Engel et Isabelle
Pariente-Butterlin. Une publication en français est programmée de cette
rencontre sous l'intitulé : Raisons. D'autres interventions seront progressivement communiquées. Dans
l'attente, le SEMa est heureux de pouvoir proposer dans son blog une version
remaniée de l'intervention du Professeur Skorupski en version originale. ]
Scanlon on the Ontology of Reason Relations v.2
John
Skorupski
§1 T.
M. Scanlon’s book, Being Realistic about
Reasons,[1] is a general account of reasons and normativity which
has, in particular in chapter 2, a notable account of what it is for normative
objects to exist. It is this account that I would like to discuss here.
In his introductory lecture, Scanlon notes two ways in
which the meta-ethical debate has changed. Up to the later 1970s, when John
Mackie published Ethics: Inventing Right
and Wrong, the focus was very largely on morality. Since then it has
broadened to the general notion of normativity:
although morality is still much discussed, a significant
part of the debate concerns practical reasoning and normativity more generally:
reasons for action, and, even more broadly, reasons for belief and other
attitudes, which are increasingly recognised as normative …[2]
The
second difference, he says, is that the focus then was on motivation,
especially the question of how moral judgements could motivate (if they did),
whereas now, though the importance of questions about motivation is not
disputed, the focus has moved to the idea of a normative reason – for action, belief or “other attitudes”. Scanlon
rather modestly remarks that this claim about meta-ethics as a whole may be
tendentious, since the two shifts may be shifts only in his own thinking.
However I think most people interested in the subject would agree that these
two shifts in the debate have indeed been quite general, if by no means
universal. The broadening of attention has had various sources, not least the
natural development of the subject; but Scanlon’s thinking has unquestionably been
a very important influence on it. We now increasingly think broadly in terms of
meta-normativity, rather than narrowly in terms of meta-ethics alone, and the
idea that the concept of a reason is the key normative concept is very much in
the air.
Scanlon’s lectures reflect both trends. He describes
himself as a Reasons Fundamentalist. This is the name he gives to the view “that
truths about reasons are not reducible to or identifiable with non-normative
truths, such as truths about the natural world of physical objects, causes and
effects, nor can they be explained in terms of notions of rationality or
rational agency that are not themselves claims about reasons.”[3] He notes that reasons might be fundamental in a further
sense, namely, that other normative concepts might all be analysable in terms
of the notion of a reason. This is a view to which he says he is inclined, but
recognises as controversial and does not propose to defend in the book
(although he later adopts it as a “working hypothesis”[4]).
I agree with Scanlon’s Reasons Fundamentalism. I also find
the hypothesis that all normative concepts are analysable in terms of reason
relations highly plausible.[5] True, we need more to establish that the concept of a
reason relation is the fundamental normative concept. What is needed
is the negative thesis that the circle of normative concepts cannot be analysed
equally well in terms of some normative concept other than that of a reason
relation, for example the concept good.
For if something like that could be done there would turn out to be more than
one way of analysing some normative concepts in terms of others; none of them would
be describable, therefore, as fundamental. I am myself sceptical as to whether there
is any analysis of normativity that is as good as or better than the one in
terms of reasons. However we do not need to pursue the matter here. Scanlon’s
ontological discussion – which he in effect takes to be a discussion of the
normative domain in general – is conducted in terms of reason relations, and I
shall follow him in that. But the analysis would work, if it works, whatever
one took fundamental normative properties to be.
The main aim of Scanlon’s discussion is to
offer “a qualified defence of a realistic cognitivism about reasons.”[6] By ‘cognitivism’ Scanlon understands the familiar view
that propositions about reasons can be true or false and, as I believe he would
accept, true or false in a perfectly standard, generic sense of ‘true’ and ‘false’
– not one that is special to the normative case. ‘Realistic’ he uses in a more
idiosyncratic way.[7] His version of cognitivism is realistic in the sense
that it accepts that some normative claims may not have determinate truth
values – this against what Scanlon would presumably take to be the unrealistic
insistence that every normative claim must have a determinate truth value. I
think he means that such insistence would be unrealistic in a familiar
non-philosophical sense of the word. Clearly then, being ‘realistic’ in this
sense does not entail endorsement of normative
realism, in any of the common
philosophical senses in which realism about the normative is opposed to
anti-realism, irrealism, or quasi-realism. On the contrary, it seems to me that
Scanlon rejects those forms of realism, while also rejecting anti-realism,
irrealism or quasi-realism. As I understand him he rejects both wings of this
debate as inappropriately metaphysical. Let us pursue this a little further.
§2 Like
several other writers on normativity, Scanlon takes reasons to be facts which
stand in a reason relation to a person and a response-type
by that person. He further distinguishes between the fact or facts that
constitute a reason and the circumstances in virtue of which they constitute
that reason. (So one might say, for example, that the fact that the building is
on fire is a reason for you to enter –
given the circumstance that you are a
fireman who has been put in charge of saving as much as possible of burning buildings.)
So
“is a reason for” is a four-place relation, R(p, x,
c, a) holding between a fact, p,
an agent x, a set of conditions c, and an action or attitude a. This is the relation that holds just
in case p is a reason for a person x in situation c to do or hold a.[8]
On this
account, as he notes, reasons, that is, the facts that are reasons, do not pose
any special ontological question that the notion of a fact in general does not
pose. As to this, Scanlon understands by facts “the reflection of true thoughts;”
he distances himself from a correspondence notion of a fact as a truth-maker
for a proposition.[9] His notion of fact is effectively the Fregean notion. Reasons
are facts in that special sense of ‘fact’ in which facts are truths, as against what ‘makes’ propositions true.
This still leaves open the question of the ontological
status of reason relations, as against reasons. Scanlon’s response in Lecture
2, though not wholly new, is developed in an innovative way. The basic idea is what
he calls the “domain-centered view”[10]
of existence. According to this, questions about what exists should be thought
of as internal to domains of discourse such as “mathematics, science, and moral
and practical reasoning.”[11]
There are
no general, domain-independent conditions of “existence”
such that the various existential claims made in every domain entail or
presuppose that entities of the kind they refer to fulfil these conditions …
the only thing common to existential claims across all domains is the purely
formal logic of the existential quantifier … the conditions required for
objects in different domains to exist varies [sic] from domain to domain.[12]
On the whole, then, and despite the elasticity
of the term ‘realism’ in current meta-normative debates, it would seem wrong to
classify Scanlon as a normative realist. That term, I believe, is most often
used to denote the view not just that normative claims express propositions, but
that those propositions are true only if they have truth-makers that make them
true, and finally, that some of them are true. Let’s drop the last thesis,
since from the meta-normative point of view it adds a claim that should be
treated separately. Realism about the normative, as I will use the term here,
is simply the thesis that normative propositions fall under a correspondence
conception of truth – leaving open the question whether any of them are true. Typical
error theorists about the normative are in this sense realists: they hold that
normative claims do indeed fall under a correspondence conception of truth, but
they think they are never true, because there are no facts that make them true.
In contrast Scanlon is not a realist in this sense; as just noted, he
explicitly denies that normative truths must have truth-makers. He is a
cognitivist, but he is not a realist.
§3 Scanlon
also distances his view from expressivism. Here however the point of difference is left somewhat
obscure. He notes that expressivists like Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn say
that their position allows them to accept that there are normative truths, and
therefore also that there are normative facts, in the Fregean sense of fact.
And of course they too will agree that these normative truths do not have truth
makers.
It is not in fact possible, I believe, to establish a
difference between Scanlon’s cognitivism and Gibbard’s complex expressivism or
Blackburn’s ‘quasi-realism’ without directly challenging the expressivists’
right to lay claim to a (standard, generic) notion of truth for the case of
normative propositions – or indeed their right to lay claim to the notion of a
normative proposition. This is
something Scanlon does not attempt, perhaps because he seeks agreement rather
than disagreement. As a result, however, his rejection of expressivism looks a
bit arbitrary.
So let’s consider the issue a little more
closely. Take, first, the claim that an utterance of the sentence ‘pleasure is
good’ in some contexts C constitutes a speech act of saying that pleasure is
good. We can assume that the expressivist will have an account of when it is
appropriate to perform that speech act. His next claim is that utterance of the
sentence ‘It is true that pleasure is good’, in the same contexts C, is a
performance of the same speech act. Call this the claim of speech act identity.
Of course there are obvious ways in which the two speech acts are not exactly
the same – different words are used. But let’s grant, for the sake of the
argument, that we have some understanding of how this claim about speech act identity
is intended.
Contrast now the claim that the proposition that pleasure
is good is the same proposition as the proposition that it is true that
pleasure is good. Call this claimed identity the propositional identity. It rests
on a view of truth which one might call the simple view, or the ‘no theory’ view,
or (with reservations) the minimalist view. The simple view will have something
to say about occurrences of ‘is true’ as a predicate, as well as occurrences of
‘It is true that’ as an operator, but we don’t need to pursue that here. At any
rate some cognitivists, of whom I’m one, agree with this simple view of truth.
How then do these cognitivists differ from expressivists? The difference is in
the order of explanation. For the simple cognitivist, the claim about speech
act identity, in the sense in which it is true, is true in virtue of the
propositional identity. The speech acts are identical in the sense that they
have the same content, that is, they are assertions of the same proposition. That
explanation cannot work for the expressivist, however, since the whole point
about expressivism with respect to such utterances as ‘pleasure is good’ is
that, whether or not they can innocuously, at the end of the analysis, be said
to be quasi-assertions of quasi-propositions, which may be quasi-true or
quasi-false, they cannot be said to be assertions of propositions in some antecedent
sense of proposition that an expressivist can take for granted as applying to
normative discourse ab initio. To
accept, ab initio, that normative
claims are assertions of propositions would remove any space for a distinctive
expressivist semantics for normative sentences.
The cognitivist relies on the notion of same proposition in understanding the
relevant notion of same speech act; he
can further argue that in understanding the relevant notion of speech act
identity we implicitly rely on a grasp of the proposition that the speech-act
asserts, and on the simple theory of truth as applied to propositions. The
expressivist will have to do it the other way round. He will have to appeal to the
speech act identity as a way of constructing propositional, or rather
quasi-propositional, identity, and quasi-propositional truth, for the normative
case. Whether this can be done, without at some stage or other begging the
question by implicitly appealing to an already
understood notion of propositional identity, is moot.
In contrast, cognitivists take it as evident that
normative assertions are assertions like any others. They can be happy with truth-conditional semantics, or any form
of semantics for normative discourse that (i) is uniformly applied to assertoric
discourse in general, as well as normative discourse in particular, and (ii)
captures the basic point that assertion is assertion of judgeable content (to
use the Fregean expression). So long as these two points are respected,
semantics is not, for the cognitivist, a main issue.
Let me call this standpoint, combined with minimalism
about truth, simple cognitivism. Before
proceeding, I should note the common view that minimalism about truth is not
compatible with a truth-conditional account of meaning. If that view were
correct, a simple cognitivist would have to give an account of meaning that was
not truth-conditional. Perhaps it would be a use theory. Whatever the theory
was, simple cognitivism would require it to preserve the point that normative
assertions express judgeable contents. However I do not myself agree that this common
view is correct; it seems to me to ascribe an over-ambitious role to
truth-conditional semantics. Such semantics should not be seen, in my view, as
being in the business of elucidating philosophically what meaning, or
correlatively, understanding is. You
can engage in truth-conditional semantics for a particular language without
having a philosophical view of the nature of meaning and understanding. If your
semantics works, it gives a systematic account of a particular language which has
the property that knowing it, together with knowing that it is true in virtue solely
of the conventions of the language in question, suffices to understand the
language.
To be sure, there is also another question, and a good
one, about whether what Michael Dummett called a ‘full-blooded’ account of
understanding, or grasp of concepts, should rely on the notion of truth, or whether
it should instead rely on characterising concepts in terms of norms for
introducing and eliminating them in thought. It may be that minimalism about
truth leads cognitivism to the latter option. But my present point is that that,
if true, in no way prevents a simple cognitivist from talking straightforwardly
about the truth conditions for normative sentences. The no-theory view of truth
is not the view that there is no such thing as truth.
§4 Since
Scanlon does not discuss these issues about truth and meaning in his lectures,
I am not sure that he can be described as a simple cognitivist. On the other
hand I’m fairly sure that that’s what he should be. This position is distinct from expressivism, but at the same
time is not realist in the meta-normative sense previously described. And
Scanlon is neither an expressivist nor a realist in that sense.
It would be a further step to describe him as an irrealist,
however. Now in view of what I’ve said so far, this may look like a merely terminological
question. Perhaps it is. However I think we need to probe further before deciding
whether or not it is, because the issues are quite elusive.
At the beginning of Lecture 2, which deals with “metaphysical”
objections to his position, Scanlon states what he says it is “natural to
describe … as an ontological objection” to his form of cognitivism about
reasons, namely
that the idea that there are irreducible normative truths
has implications that are incompatible with plausible views about “what there
is.”[13]
He immediately
adds that he does not himself believe that the “supposed problem here is one of
ontology,” even though it “will be helpful to consider the matter first in this
ontological form”. He then introduces Quine’s criterion of “ontological
commitment” – but is noticeably cautious in his use of that phrase. Plainly he
has some reservation, perhaps about over-simple ontologising.
In considering Quine’s criterion it will be useful to
distinguish two theses. The first is that if you refer to an object a, then for
some x, x = a and you are referring to x.
This is simply an instance of the principle often called existential generalisation
– but not to beg questions, I’ll follow Graham Priest[14] and refer to the quantifier as the particular
quantifier, and the principle as particular generalisation. The second thesis
is that any object on which one can quantify exists. Call this the quantificational criterion of existence.
Putting the quantificational criterion together with particular generalisation then
yields an ancient idea about existence, namely, that whatever we can refer to
in thought or discourse exists. Since particular generalisation is a logical
truism – if you refer to an object you refer to something – the only way to
resist this conclusion is to reject the quantificational criterion of
existence.
There is another ancient idea about existence: that to
exist is to have causal status or standing. Call this the causal criterion of existence. Let me stress that in itself
this criterion says nothing about the nature of causation; it is compatible
with a wide range of views about what causation and causal dependence is. As is
familiar, however, trying to combine these two criteria gives rise to
difficulties, as much in meta-ethics as in the philosophy of mathematics.
Neither reason relations nor sets seem to have any kind of causal standing, on
any reasonable interpretation of causal standing.
Scanlon is committed to rejecting the causal criterion as
a general condition on existence, for he denies that there is any such general condition: “the only thing common to
existential claims across all domains is the purely formal logic of the
existential quantifier.” In contrast, he accepts the quantificational criterion
– but he accepts it as a criterion for existence within a domain. Thus he adds that
our ontological commitments in this general sense [the
sense captured by the quantificational criterion] do not represent a claim on
our part about what the world
contains, in any meaningful sense of “the world.”[15]
To ask
what there ‘really is’, ‘in the world as such,’ is, on his view, to ask a
question about an empty notion. Furthermore, forming a general disjunctive
concept of existence across domains is he thinks a pointless manoeuvre. How
seriously ‘ontological’, then – if I may put it this way – is his acceptance of
the quantificational criterion?
§5 To examine
the question we can ask whether there is a domain of fictions, in Scanlon’s
sense of ‘domain’. The “purely formal logic” of the quantifier applies: we can consider,
for example, the proposition that there is no greater fictional detective than
Sherlock Homes, and infer that if it is true then Sherlock Holmes is at least
as great as Hercule Poirot. We can ask how many fictional detectives there have
been. We thus seem to be committed, by Scanlon’s criteria, to the existence of
fictional objects – of course in the fictional domain. For, if we are inclined
to try to paraphrase away these apparent references to fictional detectives,
that implies that we do, after all, have in mind some trans-domain condition on
existence other than, and richer than, the quantificational criterion – perhaps
the causal criterion. If the quantificational criterion is all that is in play, there is no ground for questioning our “ontological
commitment” to fictional objects.
Yet we certainly say things like
(1) There are many characters in War and Peace, some of whom existed and some of whom did not.
In this
sentence it seems prima facie obvious
that ‘exist’ or ‘really exist’ is used as an ontological predicate, while the
verb ‘to be’ is used in an ontologically non-committal sense. But according to the
quantificational criterion, if we quantify over characters in War and Peace, we are committed to their
existence. So if we take the example at face value, we should reject the
quantificational criterion.
In the example, I’ve used the verb ‘to be’ to express the
particular quantifier. In ordinary discourse, we can use both the verbs ‘to
exist’ and ‘to be’ in that quantifier role. It would, for example, be perfectly
intelligible to say
(2) There exist characters in War and Peace who are not real and characters who are
Or we
can emphasise, with ‘really exist:’
(3) Some of the characters in War and Peace really existed and some
did not.
I don’t think that common sense has any difficulty in
distinguishing between ontologically commital, and ontologically non-commital,
quantification, despite this flexibility of language. Nevertheless, the
quantificational criterion of existence may get some illegitimate plausibility
from the fact that the word ‘exists’ can be used both to express the particular quantifier and in the ontological predicate role. So in what follows I will
use ‘exist,’ and only ‘exist’, as the ontological predicate, and I will not use
it at all in the quantifier role.
If we can refer to the non-existent, an ontological
predicate is needed. If I assert that phlogiston does not exist, I seem to
refer to phlogiston. Then by particular generalisation, I refer to some x such that x = phlogiston and x does
not exist.
Now Scanlon does not allow for a non-quantificational,
irreducibly predicative use of ‘exists’. He takes ‘exists’ to express a
quantifier, though of course a domain-centred quantifier. Presumably he might
say that the War and Peace sentence
means that some x in the domain of
fictions is a character in that novel and some x in the domain of causes is a character in that novel. What then
about the statement that phlogiston does not exist? Presumably this says that
some x in the domain of posits is
phlogiston but no x in the domain of
causes is phlogiston.
Despite the element that this analysis has in common with
Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment, it seems to me that it would be
best presented as rejecting Quine’s
criterion – in the sense of rejecting it as empty:
as purporting to say something where there is nothing to say. Such a view might
be put in this way. We know how to establish truths containing quantifiers in
their various domains. There are fictional detectives in the domain of
fictions, electrons in the domain of causes, and reason-relations in the
normative domain. All these domains of discourse are legitimate. To talk about
these truths as revealing our “ontological commitments” in various domains
seems to say something more, but in fact does no more than repeat, in a
misleading way, that these truths are truths.
Scanlon rejects ontology when it is understood as a “domain-transcending
idea like Quine’s idea of ontological commitment.” “I am rejecting [he says] this
general idea of existence and arguing that genuine ontological questions are
all domain-specific.”[16]
But, he adds,
To say this is not to deny that there are important and
interesting metaphysical or ontological questions. It is only to say that these
questions are domain-specific.[17]
However
the questions Scanlon has in mind are not I think metaphysical questions. Take
the “genuine ontological questions” first. You can ask whether Higgs particles
really exist, or whether a fictional detective greater than Sherlock Holmes
exists. The first question is ontological; you might doubt whether the second
is – However, given Scanlon’s domain-centred view of existence it’s not clear
that he should doubt it. Nevertheless
I think he would agree that neither question is a metaphysical question. If they can be settled they are settled,
respectively, by the methods of physics and of literary discussion of detective
fiction. The same applies if you ask whether reason relations really exist. The
answer is that they do, if there are reasons. And it is first-order normative
discussion that settles that there are reasons. This, as I say, is something
with which Scanlon would agree.
The position then is that there is no distinctively metaphysical question to ask about existence
or about what exists. This is reminiscent of Carnap’s views about internal and
external questions, as
Scanlon notes.[18] What about the other questions that Scanlon has in mind
as domain-specific ‘metaphysical questions’? They seem to me to be questions
about the logical syntax of the domain – about how best to regiment its
discourse. So for example the question whether we should distinguish facts that
are reasons from other facts which constitute them as reasons seems to me to be
a question about what is the most useful way to regiment discourse about
reasons – the answer may vary depending on the inquiry. I do not find it useful
to call such questions metaphysical, but I accept that this truly is a terminological
matter.
§6 Scanlon’s
view is elegantly minimal. But it does not seem to me to capture everything we
think. To me it seems plausible that the War
and Peace example, as in (1), deploys a predicative use of ‘exist’ which is
(i) ontological in a domain-transcendent sense and (ii) privileges the domain
of causes: to exist in ‘real life’, ‘to really exist’, is to have causal
standing. That is what Napoleon has and Pierre does not have. There is such a thing as the world; it is the
domain of causes and Napoleon is in it while Pierre is not. Nonetheless there
are truths about Pierre, just as there are truths about Napoleon. Since we can
refer to the non-existent, references to Pierre do not need to be paraphrased
out of these truths for them to be seen as truths.
This is cognitivist irrealism about fictional objects. It
rejects the quantificational criterion of existence. And I’ll add that it
accepts the causal criterion of existence, although this further thesis calls
for more discussion than I can give it here.
§7 The
question we can now raise is whether a similar irrealist cognitivism is appropriate
for normative objects – specifically, for reason relations. I believe it is.
But I should say straightaway that that does not entail that reason relations
are fictional objects, or non-existent theoretical posits like phlogiston. To
take the first view is to be a fictionalist, to take the second is to be an
error theorist. It important to see that these are not the only options. The view
I want to defend is in fact much closer to Scanlon’s than to these, despite the
differences being discussed in this paper.
The key point is that statements about fictional objects and
putative but non-existent reals have mind-dependent truth conditions, whereas
statements about reason relations do not. But before developing it, I need to make
a point about the causal criterion of existence.
The causal criterion (§4) is important in various
contexts. In particular, however, it has an implication for knowledge. It entails
that it is perfectly legitimate to ask, of any known mind-independent existent,
by what mode of receptivity, in Kant’s
term, one knows of it. It is legitimate because, since existence is causal standing,
knowledge of objects that exist independently of one’s mind must at some point
involve a causal relation – a causal transmission terminating in a receptor located
in oneself as knower. As I’ve already said, in using the notion of cause here I
am not adjudicating among views of what may be involved in A producing B, and I’m
not, in particular, assuming that whatever it is must be naturalistically
reducible. Even so the essential point remains: knowledge of mind-independent
existents must involve some form of receptivity, however that receptivity
operates.
Suppose then that we are persuaded, for example by
Scanlon’s discussion of the epistemology of the normative, that knowledge of
reason-relations or of sets, which he also discusses, involves no such receptivity
– just spontaneity in the knowers, to use the term Kant contrasts to
receptivity. Then we must conclude that reason-relations and sets are not
mind-independent existents. This conclusion might tempt one to think that they
are mind-dependent existents. But it also leaves open the possibility that
reason-relations and sets are mind-independent inexistents. Unlike fictional objects, which are mind-dependent
objects of imagination, and non-existent theoretical posits, which are
mind-dependent objects of cognition, reason relations are mind-independent objects of cognition.
The only condition that can legitimately be placed on reference
is that we should know, and be able to communicate to each other, what we are
talking about – what our topic is. That condition requires that we should be
able to anchor our reference in some inter-subjectively intelligible way. When what
we are talking about is Sherlock Holmes the condition is amply satisfied. He’s
the detective Conan Doyle invented, the one said to live in Baker Street, and
so on. As for phlogiston, it’s a theoretical entity postulated by 18th
century scientists to explain phenomena which we now think of as oxidisation.
Contrary to Parmenidean intuitions, presentation as a de re object of thought and discourse
does not in itself entail existence. It’s true of Sherlock Homes that you and I
are talking about him, even though he does not exist. Of course, since he does not exist he
does not have any properties that presuppose existence, but being talked about
is not – unlike being a detective, living in Baker Street, or playing the
violin – an existence-presupposing property, any more than being a fictional detective, or being the
greatest fictional detective, is an existence-presupposing property.
§8 So let us turn to reason-relations and sets. As with
Sherlock Holmes and phlogiston, the fact that they are legitimate objects of
reference and quantification, and that there are truths about them, does not
entail that they exist. Crucially however we must not to jump from this to the
conclusion that they are fictional objects like Sherlock Homes, or, like
phlogiston, putative existents that turn out not to exist. These two kinds of
non-existent referent – fictions and putative existents – are imagined or
invented in the one case, postulated or hypothesised in the other. Only in
virtue of these mental acts do they become possible objects of reference; if
the chain of reference to them is traced back it must arrive at some mental
acts of this kind. The possibility of referring to them, and therefore of making
true or false statements about them, presupposes the occurrence of such mental
acts. That is not the case either with sets or with reason relations. The
possibility of referring to the set of planets, for example, does not
presuppose that anyone has imagined or invented, postulated or hypothesised, such
a set. That set is a possible object of reference that is mind-independent.
Likewise with reason relations: for example the possibility of referring to the
reason relation that holds between the fact that an action will be pleasant,
and that action, does not presuppose that anyone has imagined, invented or
postulated such a reason relation.
The possibility of referring to this reason relation does
of course depend – as always – on the possibility of anchoring the reference,
with sufficient adequacy for us to know what we are talking about. In the case
of reason relations that is done by semantic ascent. We can say, for example,
that the fact that some action will be pleasant is always a reason to do it.
Ascending an order, we can equally say that the fact that it will be pleasant
always stands in a reason relation to doing it. We might say, for example, that
it always stands in a pro tanto
reason relation to doing it but not always in a sufficient reason relation.
When we say these things we refer to reason relations. And since the
first-order statement is objectively true or false – that is, its truth value does
not depend on what we think or feel or have decided as to its truth value – it
trivially follows that the second-order statement is in exactly the same sense objectively
true or false.
The second-order statement quantifies over
reason-relations. It says that some reason relation holds between the fact that
doing something will be pleasant and doing it. From a purely logico-semantic
point of view that is fine. Semantics assigns semantic values; it will assign values
to reason predicates and to singular terms denoting reason relations. To get from
that to the conclusion that reason relations exist we need the quantificational
criterion of existence. But that
is a metaphysical not a semantic thesis. It goes beyond semantics, in a way that questions about whether the Higgs particle
exists do not go beyond physics. Physics purports to deal with
what exists. That is its mission. Hence hypothesising a particle is making a
postulate about what exists. Semantics, in contrast, purports to deal with what
we talk about when we use various bits of language. That is its mission. The further
idea that whatever we talk about exists is entirely extraneous to it.
Irrealism about reason relations rejects that idea. It
holds to a different metaphysical thesis, namely that the real, the existent,
is that which has causal standing. Reason relations, then, are irreal,
inexistent, but objective, mind-independent. I could sum this up by way of a
well-known remark often attributed to Kreisel, and which I know Scanlon likes:
what matters for mathematics is the objectivity of mathematical statements, not
the existence of mathematical objects. Likewise for normativity: what matters
for normativity is the objectivity of normative statements, not the existence
of normative objects. Normative statements are objective: normative objects are
irreal. They are, nonetheless, possible objects of reference.
Another way to illuminate the irrealist position is to
note how it brings us back to what is nowadays often seen as an old-fashioned
and question-begging distinction: the distinction between factual and normative
propositions.
The distinction is unpopular because it clashes with a
popular idea: factualism – the thesis that all propositional content is factual
content. A correspondence theory of truth is committed to factualism, since on
this view what determines the content of an assertion is its truth maker, and
truth makers are facts. In another way a person who holds that the only tenable
notion of a fact is the Fregean notion, according to which a fact is just a
truth, is also committed to it. So it may be that Scanlon is committed to it.
There is however another, and very common, notion of
fact. On this understanding a fact is the instantiation of some real property
or relation, that is, of a property or relation that has causal standing. This,
for example, is the notion of fact at stake when we talk, as we often do, about
causal relations between facts (the fact that the crane stays upright is due to
the fact that sufficient counter-weights have been installed). It is obviously a
truism that if you assert that some fact obtains, in this sense of fact, your
statement is true just if that fact does obtain. Since this is a truism, it must
be respected by any account of truth; it should therefore be clearly distinguished
from the correspondence account. It does not, unlike the correspondence account,
entail that every assertion is
factual or that all content is factual content. And indeed on the irrealist
view a purely normative proposition about reason relations has no factual
content in this common sense of fact, since reason relations are irreal. A
purely normative proposition says something alright; it just doesn’t say
anything factual. Thus to assert that the fact that some action will be
pleasant is always a reason to do it says something normative about that fact –
it doesn’t say anything factual about
that fact.
This standpoint, I believe, captures our pre-theoretical
view about normativity more closely and clearly than the standpoint proposed by
Scanlon, which introduces a domain-centred view of existence while still applying
the quantificational criterion. But, someone may ask, isn’t this standpoint actually
a mere terminological variant of Scanlon’s view? I see the point, but my tentative
inclination is to say no. True, it is a matter of convention how we use the word ‘exist’. And that word occurs in
ordinary discourse in a variety of ways (as does the word ‘fact’). It sometimes
plays the quantificational role and it sometimes plays the ontological role. So
my version of cognitivism does some regimenting of ordinary talk just as
Scanlon’s does. Moreover, if Scanlon is willing to apply his domain-centred
notion of existence to fictional objects then the two accounts are indeed very close.
Both deny that simple cognitivism about the normative requires any form of
metaphysical realism, natural or non-natural. Still, I think my account better
clarifies why that is so, through a better account of ontic criteria, and for
that reason I don’t think the two accounts are simply terminological variants. Unlike
Scanlon, I think we do have a conception of the world, or reality; unlike the
realist, I don’t believe we think it contains ‘normative facts.’ Reality is the
unified causal order through which we find our way. We are in it, in a way in
which reason relations are not.
My thanks to members of the audience at the Rio-2015 Metaethics
Conference who commented on this paper; especially to my respondent, Rodrigo
Gouvea.
[1] T. M. Scanlon, Being Realistic
About Reasons, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. This is a revised
version of the Locke lectures which Scanlon delivered in Oxford in 2009.
[5] I’ve argued that they can all be analysed that way in John Skorupski, The Domain of Reasons, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
[9] ‘The idea that normative judgements are correct when
they correspond to the normative facts is no explanation if these “facts” are,
as I have suggested, merely “the reflection of true thoughts”’ p. 66. Cp pp. 24
n. 9, 62.
[14] Priest, Graham, Towards Non-Being:
the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
